Resources For Our Future

Phil Mansfield for The New York Times

Camilla Bradey's cabin is part of the Awosting Reserve, nearly 3,000 acres ofwoodland, galcial lakes and waterfalls owned by her father on the Shawangunk Ridge.

A Fashion Designer And Her Log Cabin
By PENELOPE GREEN
GROWING up here," said Camilla Bradley, the 29-year-old preppy wardrober, "I rejected all this. I wanted to live in a normal house, with a normal family, with wall-to-wall carpeting and wallpaper."

Ms. Bradley was stretched out leggily on the deck of her three-room log cabin one hot, still afternoon not too long ago, a worn straw hat mashed down low over her eyes. Spread about her was "all this": nearly 3,000 acres of woodland, glacial lakes and waterfalls on the Shawangunk Ridge, the gnarled, vertiginous fingers of which straddle the towns of Gardiner and Shawangunk, N.Y., and make its owner, John Atwater Bradley - Ms. Bradley's father - one of Ulster County's largest landowners. Mr. Bradley, a management consultant, has named his holdings the Awosting Reserve (Awosting means "pure water" in the Algonquin Indian language, Ms. Bradley said).

Ms. Bradley is the owner and designer behind CK Bradley, a four-and-a-half-year-old company that outfits young fogies from Newport, R.I., to Palm Beach, Fla., in ribbon belts and pink satin strapless dresses (its Manhattan store is on East 74th Street).

Such costumes seem to envision a world where nature is just a pretty view neatly framed by a bright green swath of well-mown turf and the pink canvas flaps of a party tent, not this raw, fly-blown spot where a pair of Jack Rogers sandals would be about as much use as a racing bicycle. Ms. Bradley, in fact, was not wearing the iconic WASP flip-flops her customers favor, but a pair of orange and blue Skechers.

Mr. Bradley lives up the shale-strewn dirt road from his daughter, in a former Girl Scout lodge with a parrot named Thisbe, a stuffed black bear and, lately, a mannequin dressed in 1890's fashions he's named Vicky.

A loquacious and charming former Eagle Scout who first hiked into these woods in the late 1940's, Mr. Bradley is a polarizing character up here. His plans to develop the ridge into luxury estate parcels to finance a nature center has some neighbors up in arms.

On either side of the approach to the Bradley compound - which includes eight tiny cabins left over from the Girl Scouts, a log house Mr. Bradley has given to Jim Fowler, the host of the 60's-era nature program "Wild Kingdom," and a computer-sawn log dwelling called the Shire - march a small battalion of red-on-white "Save the Ridge" signs.

Part Teddy Roosevelt, part Uncle Matthew - the eccentric Nancy Mitford character - Mr. Bradley rules this ridge like a feudal lord. ("Type my name into your computer," he exhorted a visitor. "You'll see some hot stuff come up." He was right.) He has raised his daughter all by himself since his wife and their two young sons were killed by a drunk driver in 1978.

Ms. Bradley was just 2 that year, and as she grew up, her weekends and summers spent in her father's lodge, he taught her to fish and build a fire, to clear a stream and use a chainsaw. (Winters were spent in New York City, where the two still share an apartment.)

She moved from bedroom to bedroom - there are six in the lodge, which was built in 1884 and used by the Girl Scouts in the 1940's and 50's - from the old bunk room, with its six bunks stacked three on three where her brothers had slept, to her mother's room on the corner, with its roughly hewn log bed. Inside were photographs of her mother, Marilyn Bradley, a British fashion model - taut and lovely black and white images that now mirror Ms. Bradley's face.

"Every couple of years I'd graduate to a new room," said Ms. Bradley, who would hot-glue fabric and ric rac over unpainted log walls, the "wallpaper" she'd longed for. Her mother, a craftswoman of mind-boggling volume, made every napkin, pillow case and quilt, every plate and tile, even all the mattress covers. Mrs. Bradley had filled a garage down the road with bolts of fabric, canvas for oil painting or needlepoint, colored wools, tubes of paint, fabric trimmings - an endless prop closet.

"When I was a kid," Ms. Bradley said, "if I wanted to paint, there were rolls of canvas and tubes of oils. If I wanted to needlepoint or hook a rug, there was canvas and wool for that too."

Her mother's fabrics and clothes, which "Camilla poo-poo'd at first but then began to modify and wear herself," Mr. Bradley said, made a kind of interactive scrapbook from which Ms. Bradley could "learn" her mother. Further, all that hot-gluing and sewing seeded what would become a business.

At Trinity College in Hartford, Ms. Bradley made ribbon belts and sold them on the lawns, presaging even high fashion's recent dalliance with preppy style.

When she was 25, sewing samples on her father's ancient dining room table, he gave her La Casita, the little three-room cabin just yards from the lodge, for her own. A simple wood-frame dwelling that Mr. Bradley sheathed in logs (he has his own saw mill here), it had been the Girl Scouts' infirmary, and then a craft house.

"It became Camilla's," Mr. Bradley said, "when she was old enough to appreciate it."

She filled the space with pickings from the lodge - an old cane couch, a door she covered with her mother's fabric and used as a headboard, her favorite books (yards and yards of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys) - and two decades worth of Playboy magazines, the golden years of the 1950's and 60's, a gift from her father. He'd bought them at a local auction, she said, where he is such a fixture he's got two of his own seats, each labeled with a sign that reads "Sir John."

"I was mortified when he yelled out that they were for me," she said. "But he told me they'd be great inspiration. And guess what, he was right. I redesigned all our bathing suits from them. Also the gingham dresses in our stores right now. Plus, they make fabulous housewarming gifts. You can't go wrong if you bring a classic Playboy." She leaves the hot water on every day here - not her father's practice up at the lodge - and invites friends up, 12 at a time, to sleep in the loft space above the tiny living room. Father and daughter phone each other before hazarding a visit.

"He's so aware of my space," Ms. Bradley said of her father, who never remarried. "He would never come over without calling, and he expects the same of me," she continued, picking up a cordless phone. "J.B.," she said into it, "we're coming up."

Stumping through the dim rooms of his lodge, where dust motes swirled in the odd patch of sunlight and every object came with a back story - the ostrich egg on a mantel that fed 12 one winter morning (and was a gift from Mr. Fowler), the 1947 Garland stove that had belonged to Julia Child.

Mr. Bradley stopped to point out the imprints in the terra cotta kitchen's hexagonal floor tiles: the pet goose foot stamped in one, the German shepherd paw in another. (Even Ms. Bradley's then tiny foot made its mark in a bathroom tile.) Her mother had fired every tile herself, he said proudly, and then scored each with the tips of her fingers.

"I think the Lord has blessed me," Mr. Bradley began.

"Same thing with this kid," he concluded, as his daughter stepped into the sunshine.

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